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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Friday, December 16, 2011

Debunking the Marco Polo Myth

Raining on the Venetian Explorer's
Pasta Parade

You know, it's nigh on to impossible to
unlearn something. Especially when that thing has been ingrained in
popular culture as something “everybody knows.” For example:
everybody knows Marco Polo brought pasta from China to Italy.

Except he didn't. Well, to be fair, he
may have brought some Chinese pasta home with him – sort of a
medieval version of Chinese take-out – but he did not “introduce”
pasta to Italy.

“But that's what they taught me in
school!” Yeah, me too. Another example of a flawed public education
system. That story was fed to me in the '60s. My sister got it in the
'50s. My mother heard it in the early '30s. And from there the trail
disappears. Why? I'll tell you why; before that time it didn't exist. Or if it did it was only as a vague rumor.

Americans have known about pasta for a
long time, although they didn't call it that at first. The term
“pasta” didn't come into general usage in non-Italian speaking
areas until the late 19th century. Before that, the
substance made from durum wheat and water was commonly referred to as
“macaroni.”

Thomas Jefferson fell in love with
macaroni when touring the Italian regions in 1787. He even had a
pasta machine imported to the United States and designed and built
one of his own as early as 1793. He is widely credited with serving
macaroni and cheese at the White House during his term as president
from 1801 to 1809. (It wasn't called “the White House” when
Jefferson lived there. Another old grade school lesson busted.) In
fact, he is often erroneously said to have “invented” the dish.

Macaroni was so popular in colonial
times that it became a fashion statement. Like Jefferson, many young
English aristocrats of the era toured Italy and became enamored of
macaroni, to the extent that in short order the appellation
“macaroni” came to be associated with a fop or a dandy. Someone
with a high-flown sartorial sense. You didn't really think that when
Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni, he
was talking about pasta, now did you? I know, I know. That's the way
you learned it in school.

Anyway, back to Marco Polo and how we
all came to believe that he revolutionized the world by introducing
pasta to Italy.

To say that a lot of Italians emigrated
to America in the late 19th and early 20th
century would be an understatement. And as they came in their
millions, they brought their native food culture with them; a culture
that included pasta. But at first the stuff was really only popular
in Italian neighborhoods. Despite Jefferson's appetites, the majority
of Americans hadn't quite caught on to it yet. Enter the Macaroni
Journal, a trade publication of
the National Association of Macaroni and Noodle Manufacturers of
America. This outfit existed, as one might expect, to promote the
manufacture and sale of macaroni and noodles in America, and the
Macaroni Journal was
its publicity organ. Again, as one might expect, a lot of the
information published in its pages was directed at an uninformed
audience in order to familiarize them with the product so they would
buy more of it. And it was in the October 1929 edition of the
Macaroni Journal that
the old Marco Polo myth was foisted off on an unenlightened American
public in an article entitled “A Saga of Cathay.”

Marco
Polo made quite a name for himself in the 13th
century. A true merchant of Venice, he traveled to the little-known
reaches of Asia, met the great Kublai Khan, earned an important place
in the Chinese court, and returned to Venice twenty-four years later
a fabulously wealthy man. While a political prisoner of rival Genoa,
he dictated his memoirs of his journey to far Cathay. The book
engendered great interest in the vast and mysterious Far East. Even
the Genoese explorer known to American schoolchildren as Christopher
Columbus is thought to have been influenced by Marco Polo's work.

In a brief mention
of the kinds of food he encountered, Marco Polo says something about
a dish similar to macaroni. And somehow that statement became the
basis for the belief of future generations that he was responsible
for bringing pasta to Italy. If anybody would actually take the time
to read Marco Polo's writings it would be obvious that he was already
familiar with pasta when he visited China. In fact, there are
confirmed examples of other people in Italy writing about
“maccheroni” years before Marco Polo ventured out of Venice.

Even though the
story was identified in the article as a legend, American readers
sort of blocked out that word, and it was off to the races for Marco
and his “discovery.”

A few
years later, Gary Cooper, playing the inveterate Venetian traveler in
the 1938 film The Adventures of Marco Polo, asks
one of his Chinese hosts about the dish he is being served. “What
are they, snakes?” asks the Great Explorer. “We call it spa get,”
is the unlikely reply. Please!

Nobody
knows for certain where Italian pasta originated. Some scholars
credit the Etruscans. Some note that the Romans ate a form of pasta.
Others cite the Greeks. Most think that pasta was carried to Italy
via Muslim invaders who conquered Sicily in the 9th
century. All that aside, nobody – I repeat – nobody
believes that Marco Polo
introduced it from China. Nobody except a couple of generations of
American elementary school teachers influenced by self-promoting
trade magazines and hokey movies.

If you
don't want to think for yourself and do your own research –
concepts that are not commonly taught in American public schools –
just do what everybody else does and Google the subject. If after
hours of reading hundreds of authors writing thousands of words
debunking the Marco Polo myth, you still choose to adhere to what
Miss Jones taught you in the first grade, well, there's really no
hope for you. Just sit back and slurp your spaghetti with the
unthinking hordes who believe everything they read in the National
Enquirer – or the Macaroni
Journal.

Or you
can take up my crusade to stop this silly story before it pollutes
the thinking of still another generation. My kids got the word about
Marco Polo at about the same time they learned the truth about Santa
Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. With the modern
preponderance of evidence to the contrary, I don't think
schools actually teach that
unmitigated merda anymore,
but then I see it in print or hear it related on television and I go
off screaming into the night.

No
less a personage than Giuseppe Garibaldi once said, “It will be
maccheroni, I swear to
you, that will unite Italy.” So I call upon Italians,
Italian-Americans, wannabe Italians, and generally intelligent people
the world over; stop the Marco Polo myth! Let the Chinese take credit
for chow mein but stand up for your spaghetti! March for your
macaroni! Protest for your pasta!

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)